Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a public supporter of repealing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, bristled at the idea today that a federal district court judge could mandate that repeal.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Wednesday that abruptly ending the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy as a federal judge has ordered would have enormous consequences.

A day after a judge in California ordered the Pentagon to cease enforcement of its policy barring gays from openly serving in the military, Gates told reporters that the question of whether to repeal the law should be decided by Congress, and done only after the Pentagon completes its study on the issue.

“I feel strongly this is an action that needs to be taken by the Congress and that it is an action that requires careful preparation, and a lot of training,” said Gates. “It has enormous consequences for our troops.”

Gates doesn’t really spell out those “enormous consequences,” “careful preparation” or “training” for just allowing gay service members already serving to continue. Somehow, Harry Truman signed an executive order desegregating the Army and the world didn’t come to an end.

It sounds to me that Gates is basically challenging the Justice Department to appeal the order, intimating that he wouldn’t honor it. Reminds me of Andrew Jackson’s admonition to the Supreme Court: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”

And there’s a double-move here, of course. The Defense Secretary wants Congress to change the policy, but only after the release of the Pentagon study, which will happen after a new Congress, likely to be more hostile to repeal, gets seated. This is all evaded with an assurance that the study only looks at how to implement repeal, not whether to enact it, and that such a change is only a matter of time. Robert Gibbs basically said the same thing today.

“The president strongly believes that this policy is unjust, that it is detrimental to our national security, and that it discriminates against those who are willing to die for their county. And the president strongly believes that it’s time for this policy to end,” he said. “The best way to end it is for the Senate to follow the lead of the House of Representatives so that that end can be implemented in a fashion that is consistent with our obligations in fighting two wars.

“Absent that action, the president has again set up a process to end this policy. And I think the bottom line is that recent court rulings have demonstrated to Congress that it’s time to act and end this policy; they demonstrated that time is running out on the policy of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and the bottom line is this is a policy that is going to end. It’s not whether it is going to end but the process by which it is going to end.”

While there are some Constitutional reasons for the Administration to defend the law in the case of DADT and DOMA, it puts him in a terrible moral position, ignores the realities of the next Congress, and doesn’t gain the President or his party a single voter (while probably losing many more, or at least their enthusiastic support). But Gates’ defiance puts the President in a fairly impossible spot. The best way out in a situation like this may just be to say the hell with it and do what’s right.

Gee, Truman initiated desegregation in the armed forces with an executive order. And he sure wasn’t loved by the military establishment or the racist bigots for that decision. I don’t think being loved was a variable in Truman’s decision.

Of course that is when we had a President who was a leader. Obama wouldn’t end a simple declarative sentence about tying his shoe laces with a period unless he had bipartisan support, had gotten an OK from the corporations, and had done the calculations to see how such a brazen, risky grammatical decision would affect his re-election chances.

The Democrats and Obama are in seach of their base; their base is in search of a party and a leader. And in the near future never shall the twain meet.

pentagon news:
On Feb. 2, Gates announced he’d ordered a review to understand the implications of a possible repeal of the 17-year-old law that bans gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military. President Barack Obama has called on Congress to repeal the law.

The initial 45 days of that review, he said, produced findings that “would enforce the existing law in a fairer and more appropriate manner” and are supported by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen and Vice Chairman Marine Corps Gen. James E. Cartwright and the service chiefs.

The Pentagon’s top lawyer, Jeh Johnson, and Army Gen. Carter F. Ham, commander of U.S. Army Europe, head Gates’ working group charged with studying the potential implications of the law’s repeal. The panel will report its findings by Dec. 1.http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=58476

Admiral Mullen favors change:
“Mr. Chairman, speaking for myself and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do,” Mullen said. “No matter how I look at the issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, personally, it comes down to integrity — theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.”http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6166493-503544.html

President Harry S. Truman, America could use your “straight talk,” right now! A little truth about the difference between what is right and what is wrong. An Executive Order, from the Commander and Chief was at one time definitive.

BTW, Oil’s up for November delivery on the NYMEX $83.00. Let the “double dip” begin!

How strange….for some reason, I don’t see Obama picking up the Gay Rights baton and whacking Gates around a bit, with it.

WTF; let’s cut to the chase: farting in the prez’s face is a cottage industry at the Pentagon, and he used up his Truman-quota when he fired McChrystal. If he cans Gates for being a scofflaw, he’ll need to find another warbot, and getting people to run UP the gangplank of the Titanic just now, aint gonna be easy.

No problem. Harry “The Lion” Reid will bring this up and force the GOP to filibuster a popular bill right before the election. His bold move will reinforce the already growing perception of him as a principled, courageous leader ready to face the recalcitrant minority and show them just who the hell is king of the jungle.

Quite frankly, the President as Commander in Chief and the Congress under its exclusive authority to provide for the regulation of the military have at least a plausible claim to ignoring this federal judge’s ruling, at least with respect to soldiers who weren’t parties to the suit and over which the judge has no jurisdiction.

This is why judges don’t try to give orders to the military: it’s not their job. Just because this judge has issued an injunction doesn’t change the fact that DADT is still on the books, the implementing rules and regulations are still in place, and the President hasn’t given any orders suspending the policy.

It’s not the role of the courts to set national military policy, a role unelected judges would be heinously bad at.

How does one serve as ‘gay’ anyway? I mean, service members wear uniform for much of the time, and are heavily regulated. Strikes me that there would be very few opportunities to be ‘gay’ and get nervous heteros all in a tizzy.

The whole thing is bizarre, and Obama’s pusillanimity is pathetic. And why is Gates still there? Can’t a Dem do the job?

Gates was out there again today talking about possible changes required to Defense Dept buildings re DADT. So, he’s bringing back the “shower curtain” controversy and the suggestion of segregated facilities (barracks).

It’s quite obvious the reason the Gates doesn’t want the courts or even the congress to repeal DADT before their report and implementation “plan” come out in December is because that plan is going to be a slow walk of implementation that will take YEARS to complete. And, ultimately it will result is segregated housing and facilities. It will result in some occupations being “off limits” to gays etc, etc, etc.

Gates already stated that after repeal he wants another year to continue discharges. The court would never allow that. And, the administration made the House remove the non-discrimination language from their original bill just so they could ultimately implement policies like segregated facilities and limited job opportunities.

don’t know about you bolloxref, but I’m “gay” 24 hours a day. But, that’s different than being engaged in sexual activity. So, I’m not quite sure what you mean. There is certainly no part of the day that I am heterosexual.

But, maybe to provide a better answer for you…. The bigots think that the current DADT policy is the only thing keeping gay members of the military from sexually attacking the heteros. They think that once the threat of DADT is gone, they will be propositioning and harassing and attempting to rape all the straight men in the military. You know, cause that’s just how the gays behave in the rest of society. Gays are constantly attacking straight men in the showers of public gyms. Gays are always attacking straight men on the streets. Why, it hardly safe to walk around in public as a straight man any more.

When you have a budget measured in trillions of dollars, you begin to think that you are God.

God help us, please. The military industrial complex is in full charge. I don’t see this mess turning around until it rusts from the inside like the Soviet Union. This sucks. And it’s probably not that far out into our future.

Gates and Mullen are making a very big deal about changing the policy. Mullen, who’s pretty straight (pardon the pun):

The military commander [Mullen] went on to acknowledge that he does “not know this for a fact, nor do I know for a fact how we would best make such a major policy change in a time of two wars.”

“That there will be some disruption in the force I cannot deny,” he said. “That there will be legal, social and perhaps even infrastructure changes to be made certainly seem plausible. We would all like to have a better handle on these types of concerns. And this is what our review will offer.”http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-6166493-503544.html

How to implement repeal? Does this make sense? Wouldn’t you simply stop implementing DADT and let the men and women just do their jobs as they have been? Or is his real problem how to deal with all the homophobic morons we have in the military?” Maybe they could consider a DADT policy for them.

quite honestly, I think they get their ideas of what “open service” would look like from Corp Klinger in “M.A.S.H.”. They fully expect every gay man is going to be allowed to put on heels, makeup and a feather boa and wander around camp in drag.

If they shared a brain cell among them, all they would have to do is take a look and a listen to the gay men who have been all over the media lately on this issue and ask themselves if any of them look the least bit like drag queens.

Who knows? We can’t ask and they can’t tell. The fear seems to be that if they DID tell then there would be an accompanying significant change in their behavior which would require new room designs, or something. We don’t know yet because the report isn’t finished. The Pentagon can’t make decisions w/o a ten month study, after all. God forbid we should be attacked in the meantime.

Based only on my experience in the Army infantry, the whole “unit cohesion” argument is bunk. With the exception of a minority of authoritarian homophobes, gay soldiers did not affect cohesion. And the ideal that “we are all green” can as easily extend to sexual orientation as it does with ethnicity. However, if the plan is to punt DADT to a potentially more conservative Congress after the elections in hope of a less gay-friendly resolution, then we might consider that strident aversion to homosexuality and cultural pluralism are often expressions of fascism.

One thing to consider is that the military requires extreme conformity. If a soldier is openly and irreconcilably outside of the overtly hyper-masculine, heterosexual (however homoerotic, and it is) culture of the military, such sexual deviance is anathema. From this perspective, there is no sliding scale, so to speak, and all gay soldiers might as well be Klinger in the eyes of those who will not tolerate the lack of conformity.

(Note: I don’t use the word deviance to suggest anything negative. I mean it in the neutral sense as existing in opposition to cultural norms.)

Congress actually gave the President a great deal of power in 1993 with the bill everybody is calling DADT. The law itself does not in any way spell out the “we don’t ask, you don’t tell” principles which were later enacted as official DoD policy.

Okay, so the bill out of congress says essentially that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals shouldn’t be in the military because homosexuality is bad, evil, icky, and makes our armies lose wars. The bill then goes on to say the President, through his SecDef and DoD should come up with a policy and set of rules that discharges known LGBs, and describes some conditions under which this is supposed happen.

Then comes the interesting bit: “Rule of Construction.— Nothing in subsection (b) shall be construed to require that a member of the armed forces be processed for separation from the armed forces when a determination is made in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Defense that— (1) the member engaged in conduct or made statements for the purpose of avoiding or terminating military service; and (2) separation of the member would not be in the best interest of the armed forces.
Source: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/10/654.html

So there you have it: Two ways they don’t have to kick out someone who says they’re gay or is known to be gay. One is when the claim –whether true or not — is for the purpose of getting out of the armed forces. The other is if the person’s discharge is not in the best interest of the armed forces.

DADT as a DoD policy came from the Clinton Administration’s interpretation of that law. Note again that it does not actually require gays and lesbians to be discharged if the armed forces will be harmed in doing so. But they leave it up to the armed forces, DoD and presumably on up to the president to determine whether harm exists or not.

Thus it is simple fact that every president from Clinton on has had the power to suspend DADT in individual cases, and by extension to all — because the DADT policy Clinton’s DoD drafted specifically listed war and national emergency as reasons why the policy might be suspended. They never actually needed a repeal. Fehrenbach, Choi, Witt and the rest of them — the military all along had the legal power to ignore DADT if they wished to do so.

True, a repeal would be better because it would remove the sense of congress assertion in law that homosexuals harm the military, which judges are obliged to take into account when making their rulings. But at the same time, the law itself has a massive executive branch / DoD loophole.

Obama in reality could have stopped the discharges with a stroke of his executive memo pen.

“A member of the armed forces shall be separated from the armed forces . . . if one or more of the following findings is made . .. That the member has engaged in, attempted to engage in, or solicited another to engage in a homosexual act or acts unless there are further findings. . . that the member has demonstrated that such conduct is a departure from the member’s usual and customary behavior.”